Health Education Programs of Government Agencies

Abstract

In reviewing governmental health education programs for Negroes certain difficulties and limitations affecting the development of such programs stand out in bold relief. Beside varying degrees of skin pigmentation, the American Negro has little in common not also characteristic of other ethnic groups in his environs. To the extent permitted by restraints of social and economic segregation, his ambitions, pleasures, work and habits are the same as those of the majority group. The Negroes' habits and thinking are being continually altered by the same agencies which form the dies of public opinion and conduct for the other nine-tenths of the American people. Even theories of the Negroes' increased susceptibility or resistance to specific diseases because of racial differences are being rapidly exploded by proof that factors other than race are responsible where differences in racial morbidity and mortality exist. In this country, the need for a Negro health education program is limited to those communities where segregation denies or limits the Negroes' participation in the general health program. This segregation exists throughout the South, where the majority of the Negroes live, and in a few Northern centers where segregated units have been encouraged or accepted by misguided or personally ambitious Negroes, assured by usually unkept promises of either accommodations on a par with those for whites or of lucrative positions.